It's
good to be Patricia Barber these days. The singer/pianist with the deep,
winsome voice admittedly in a good place, getting gigs, getting recognition,
amassing a following that, while not Diana Krall-ish in number, is strong
and growing. And she's about to release a new CD on Blue Note, comprised
of virtually all original music (one song is Verlaine prose adapted to
her music).

Verse,
coming out this month, is also produced by Barber, and while the process
of having to wear many hats -- singer, pianist, arranger, bandleader
-- and straining with the reins of production can run her ragged at
times, she's proud of the disc, and happy to trade off the exhaustive
work in exchange for having full control of the final product. That
integrity -- that strength of artistic vision and desire to see it through
-- is important to her.

Bravo.

What
she's produced, Barber says, is a piece of work that expresses her art
and that is consistent with her artistic journey and her principles.
Consistency is what she is seeking throughout, even as she eyes, off
in the distance, her next project.

The
sultry, almost mysterious deep voice of Barber is unique on the current
jazz scene. She caresses lyrics in a different way, even when the tempo
is faster. On slower tunes, with her intimate lyrics, she seduces you
in, welcomes you to her world expressed in a poetic style of lyric writing.

She's
been widely praised as the next hip thing, and called "the Ice
Queen from Hell" by critic Will Friedwald for a style he perceives
as standoffish. But she's comfortable with who she is and what she does.
Her vision is as clear and strong as her speaking voice and calm, thoughtful
nature. She appears to be able to handle anything, the praise or the
criticism. The praise is quite warranted.

"I
probably would sell more records if I did things a different way, but
then I wouldn't be quite happy. I can't really complain--I've done well.
I've been very careful all along. Even when I was working bars, I was
very careful with my money. I have a nice lifestyle," she says.
And her audience may not fill stadiums, but it's there. It waits for
her next work. It listens. It appreciates that Barber is an artist who
is reaching.

"You
have to content yourself, perhaps," she ponders, "with being
more important to fewer people. Sometimes you feel bad that you're not
selling a million records, but then you wouldn't be on the cutting edge
of anything. They're incompatible. They're mutually exclusive. So you
just have to make that choice and I think I've made it, so I have to
live with it."

So
Barber keeps working, keeps looking for more, both as singer, writer
and pianist. She's been through the bars and smoky, crusty clubs of
Chicago, where she was born and raised. Patricia Barber is someone we're
going to hear from for a long time. Thankfully.

"I'm
still practicing piano. I want to be as good as Keith Jarrett and Brad
Mehldau. I keep thinking I can get it," she chuckles, "I'm
gonna nail this, you know?"

So
adamant, is Barber, about improving her piano chops, she plays a weekly
gig in the Chicago suburbs with a bass player where she doesn't sing.
She just works out on piano in a restaurant that she won't name, though
she admits, "People know about it by word of mouth now. They're
starting to crowd around the piano."

But
she does know where her strengths, and career, lie. "I think because
I'm a singer, I probably work more. It seems to be something people
relate to: the voice over the instrumentation."

Since
she came onto the scene with Café Blue in 1995 (garnering much
more attention then her earlier A Distortion of Love), Barber has been
gathering steam. Her years of paying dues in the Windy City's club scene
-- "a lot of years of smoke and late nights" -- have paid
off.

Barber
said she started hearing the music for Verse three years ago, feeling
it as a guitar-influenced album; a Joni Mitchell-influenced way of expressing
jazz, but funneled through Barber's intimate, personal touch. It doesn't
even feature her strong piano playing (fine this time around, she says,
because it made producing the recording a bit easier. When she produced
her previous CD, Nightclub, "there were times I thought I would
keel over" from exhaustion, mental and physical).

She
said there is no theme to the lyrical CD; it's really about songwriting
and about her feelings. Writing, she said, is a laborious process. She
doesn't just churn things out for the sake of getting something out.
The technique is different too. "Sometimes the writing is music
driven and sometimes lyric driven," she says.

Patricia Barber
VerseBlue Note/Premonition

The
new disc is a collection of songs expressing different feelings in different
ways. Like so many of her tunes, it often seems to be poetry put to
music. Not your mother's poetry. Funky. Earthy. Quirky. Funny. Cool.
It has nods to the likes of Cole Porter, but also Mose Allison.

The
lyrics are heady; they take some thought, but it's worth it. Irony,
humor and dead-on emotional bullseye are some of the things you'll find
in them. The disc also carries some rthymic twists, rhythmic drones,
and the trumpet of Dave Douglas splashing colors in various spots to
augment the proceedings.

Like
"Eat Your Words," a seduction piece, she says, envisioned
as a student's perhaps somewhat taboo feelings for a teacher.

philosophy
engenders a rational man
Descartes would be the first to agree
syllogistically speaking if 'A' is you
and 'B' is me
logical progression will lead to 'C'

Barber
was always into music. Her father, Floyd "Shim" Barber, was
a Chicago saxophonist who played with the likes of Glenn Miller. So
her interest in music was early, and not influenced by the music most
common on the radio or on turntables during her youth. She loved Judy
Garland.

"The
Beatles? I didn't like them. I definitely didn't like the Rolling Stones.
I didn't really get any of that stuff. So the music of my time, I didn't
really get. I was listening to what I guess you call the classic American
songsters. Frank Sinatra. I wasn't really into the really hip people,
like Sarah Vaughan, until high school. And Miles Davis." Her influences
eventually included Sheila Jordan, Shirley Horn, Keith Jarrett and Chick
Corea and well as Miles and Joni Mitchell.

In
high school "I was one of those band kids. I was always in all
the festivals. I really loved music. Played every instrument. I didn't
start singing until the high school music, tryouts for the musical.
I tried out and I got the part. Then I really didn't sing again until
I got to college. There was a note on the board for a girl singer in
a pop band. And I needed the job, so I applied. And I got the job. Then
I had to figure out how to sing. Because I was a musician, I kind of
knew how to sing already. It was relatively easy, actually."

"I
was a classical piano major at the University of Iowa. And a psychology
major. The psychology major was to give me an out," she said slyly.
In the event music didn't work out, "I could go to law school or
medical school or something. My father was a jazz musician, but nobody
wanted me to do that, because he died an alcoholic. So I was trying
to do something in music -- but safer. In the end I decided that the
jazz musicians were just having more fun than the classical musicians,
so I called my mother and said I was going to go into jazz."

She
stuck with her decision -- "stupidly," she jokes -- from her
senior year in college. And there were, typically, a lot of lumps to
take along the way.

"Tough.
Really tough. Chicago was a big city and we have some very sophisticated
musicians here and I wasn't really ready for the big time at all,"
she says. "The singer got a lot of the work, then the pianist had
a lot of catching up to do."

The
gigs took her "all over Rush Street, the typical Chicago places;
all mob joints. We just had a fabulous time. Those are really some of
my best memories," she says. "All of the musicians helped
me. Sometimes I would need a certain lesson from a certain pianist and
I would call and have a lesson or two, or they'd help me on a gig; tell
me what to study, what to listen to. Tell me what I was bad at."

Chicago's
Green Mill also became a place that helped solidify her reputation,
as it has for artists like Kurt Elling.

"I
play there when I call them now, when I want a gig; I want to rehearse
the band, or I put in some new material. I don't play there on a weekly
basis because, frankly, I got too busy. I was on the road, and doing
that gig after I got home was really tough," she says, adding,
"The Green Mill is a fabulous place to play. It's a fabulous club.
All the national acts are starting to get wind of it and go through
there now."

So
it's good being Patricia Barber. She likes where she's been and likes
where she's headed. So does Blue Note, which will be handling her next
project.

"Trying
to figure out what my next project will be is a fun, period, because
you kind of read a lot and think a lot and listen to a lot of music.
So that's where I'm at right now." More original works are in the
offing. "I definitely would like to continue that. It's a long
thing. It takes me a long time to write music. I think I do way too
much research," she says with a chuckle.

"I
might do a live record. There are a lot of projects I'd like to do.
I'd like to actually do more piano in recording. So there are things
I would like to do in the meantime," she said, if Blue Note isn't
patient enough to wait for more original compositions to spring from
Barber's mind, to pen, to paper. "Even if they're not patient,
I can't really speed up the writing process. There's nothing I can do
really."

While
things are going well, Barber is enough of a realist to know that fortune
can be unpredictable and fickle. Nonetheless, she's prepared.

At
times, "You have to put your head down and just pay attention to
the music," she says. "They don't always like you, there's
no doubt. It's not always easy. But if you really love what you're doing,
what can they possibly do to you?

What
of criticism? "I've had my share. I remember a period thinking,
'I wonder how Diana Krall could survive those reviews?' They were so
mean and so cutting. She's a friend of mine and if you've ever seen
her play in concert, you know she can play and sing. I guess they had
built her up and she was no longer an underdog. She's wildly successful.
You [critics] put them up there and you drag them down. I don't know
how she survived it, but she did. The music business is tough. There's
no getting around that."